


The Chrysanthemum

by islasands



Series: Lambski [64]
Category: Adam Lambert (Musician)
Genre: M/M, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-21
Updated: 2012-09-21
Packaged: 2017-11-14 17:20:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/517666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/islasands/pseuds/islasands
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This story is a slice of love, a bit like the slice of a fruit. Inside it you can see the seeds for tomorrow, the juice modules for today, and the protective lining in which all is kept intact. </p><p>The song is "I'm Your Man", written and sung by Leonard Cohen. You might like to listen while you read.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Chrysanthemum

"I'm Your Man"

 

Leonard Cohen

 

  


 

 

Sauli went outside. He leaned over the deck rail and looked down. The car was waiting in the driveway. The driver tried to take his case but Adam refused his help. He struggled to open the trunk and called out to the driver. The driver came to show him how to open it. Adam put the case inside and slammed the trunk shut. He stood there for a moment, his hands on either side of the trunk, and hung his head. The driver said something. Adam looked at him and then looked up at the house. He saw Sauli but didn’t wave. Nor did he smile. He got into the car and it drove away. Sauli sighed. If anyone should ever hurt him, he thought. He went back into the house. His mind grimaced. Too late to think that. They already have. Paskiainen. He slid the sliding doors shut. He locked the lock. He went into the kitchen and examined the contents of the pantry and refrigerator but there was nothing he felt like eating or drinking. He flung himself down on a couch and turned on the television. 

_“I don’t know what's wrong. It’s nothing anyone has done or not done.”_

_“Come here. Here.”_

_“I can hear your heartbeats. Don’t stop. I like you ruffling my head. I like it better than anything.”_

_“Now you are comfortable. You have such a big head. It is the weight of a stone. No wonder you get tired.”_

_“You know, sometimes I just want to stop everything. Get a nine to fiver. Get a hobby. Go fishing.”_

_“Can you do the fishing?”_

_“No.”_

_“I will take you to a small house I know, in the forest. There is a lake and many fish. You will catch the fish and I will cook it.”_

_“Keep talking.”_

_“In the small house there are games for children. And romantic novels left there by my sister. And a record player.”_

_“I don’t want to play the records. I want it to be like this. My stone of a head on your lap and you talking and nothing outside that can get me.”_

_“There might be wolves.”_

_“Wolves are okay. They can come inside if they want.”_

_“You are missing them, I think.”_

Sauli decided to shower. He wished they had a sauna. There was no better place to think, or rather, to enjoy not thinking. He checked his phone. Usually he texted within minutes of leaving. Sure enough, there it was. “You are a gift in my life.” He sent a reply, “You have hurt the gift. You left your teeth on me.” Sauli threw the phone down on the couch. He stood up and undressed right where he was in the living room. He examined his body. There. And there. He fingered the marks. There was a bruise on the side of his thigh and he pushed it like a button. He ran his hand through his hair. He decided it was time to cut his toenails but he would do it after the shower when they had been softened. He checked the phone once more. Hah. The message was short and sweet, - “Good job.” He smiled at the message. He knew exactly how to get his love, how to hit the right spot. Abruptly, as in drawing down a blind, he left all thoughts of Adam in the darkened room of his heart and set forth to conquer the day ahead of him. He showered, cut his toenails, and called the person he was meeting for lunch. 

_At times like this there there was little in the way of intimacy. It was mating, pure and simple and he had no argument with its solitary nature. When fingernails scraped over his nipples he batted the hands away without conviction. When he was thrown face down and his legs roughly pulled apart he wanted the weight of his lover’s head to make his thighs and anus feel unbearably pressured. Packed with pressure. Like being held under water when you didn’t want to be. And when the hand tightened around his throat he wanted it to tighten still further so that his struggle to be fully captured was heightened by his struggle to be free. And when he looked into his lover’s eyes he wanted the absence of tender expression to be complete, so complete that the rhythm of fucking could made him desperate. Not desperate for anything common or correct such as declarations of love, approvals of love. No, not that, but desperate for some kind of final repudiation of self-importance, an act of being owned that was so abstract it made him feel like a planet suspended on stings, manipulated, made to dance, by the hands of a universe that didn’t even know he existed. My love, he would think afterwards. Licking his wounds._

In the evening he sat at the dining room table and ate the meal he had prepared. He sat at the table as though he wasn’t alone and to all intents and purposes he wasn’t alone. In the centre of the table a tall white flower stood, unbending, in a vase. It had the look, Sauli decided, of sculpted snow on a frozen stem.

_“You don’t mind being by yourself, do you. Like, you don’t care. If you're by yourself, you're happy.”_

_“Yes.”_

_“But what do you think about?”_

_“Nothing.”_

_“You must think something.”_

_“I do my task.”_

_“What task? What is your task when you lie in the sun or on our bed or on the couch or sitting at the table. By yourself.”_

_“To do those things. What else is there? If I am eating then I do it. If I lie in the sun, I do that. If I walk somewhere, I am walking.”_

_“You are the most thoroughly organized thinker I have ever met. Thank fuck.”_

_“Organized?”_

_“You don’t waste time.”_

_“And this is good?”_

_“It is so good I feel I am the luckiest man alive. I wish I knew how to do that. I live from the neck up. I forget my body. I think too much.”_

_“Dinner?”_

_“Dinner?”_

_“Yes. I am hungry.”_

_“See? There you go. You’re like a river. You never stop to look back at your journey.”_

_“Then you are safe with me.”_

On his way home Sauli had stopped at a garden centre. He had no intention of buying anything. He just liked the smell. It was like the smell in a greenhouse. As a child he liked visiting the city’s gardens and to wander through the galleries of the greenhouse where the air was humid and fragrant and even the light was damp. His favourite part was the cactus collection, which was behind glass, a miniature desert set out with strange plants that had bulges for flowers, or crowns like dandelion crowns, or single flowers that hung between spikes like drops of blood. My love is a greenhouse, he thought, as he wandered through the various sections of the garden centre. Trees, ornamental, fruiting, deciduous, shedding. Shrubs, flowering, variegated, perfumed. Plants for the pleasure of the eye, plants for the pleasure of the stomach. He bent his head to sniff at a massive white chrysanthemum bloom and liked the smell so much he bought a stem. 

_“What did you do today?”_

_"Nothing much.”_

_“Tell me.”_

_“Um. I ate things. I read things. I said things. I watched things. I cleaned the pool. I made lists.”_

_“What else did you do?”_

_“I had lunch with the editor.”_

_“How did that go?”_

_“Good. Why are you laughing?”_

_“You make me happy. What else did you do?”_

_“I bought a flower.”_

_“Show me the flower.”_

Sauli fetched the flower and held it up for Adam to see. The stalk dripped onto his bare leg. He twirled the bloom. It looked like a giant petal pom-pom. He gave it a squeeze with his free hand. He wondered how long it would take to pull off the petals, one by one. The urge to dismantle the flower was so strong that he couldn’t help pulling off one of its petals. He dropped it on the floor then buried his face in the remaining petals. Adam, watching him on the screen, couldn’t think of anything to say. The picture of his lover burying his face in the white flower had caused his thinking processes to stall. Their eyes met across the soft bed of petals. it was one of those moments that in and of itself says it all. They might as well have been in bed, exhausted, about to kiss goodnight.

_“Did I make that mark on your neck?” Adam asked tenderly._

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
